Photography of Religious Architecture

Tag Archives: medieval

The first time we saw Père Angelico Surchamp, the diminutive monk was with a group of admirers at the Convent of Notre Dame de Venière just outside of Tournus where he served as confessor to the nuns. One of the guests – obviously a great admirer – insisted on taking his picture. Smiling, Surchamp asked, “What am I? A national monument?” I remember thinking at the time, “Of course you are!”

Dom Angelico Surchamp, September 20, 2011

PJ and I have been planning our fall trip to Europe. As always, we put on the list a visit to the Abbaye de la Pierre-qui-Vire, home to our great mentor. The last time we saw him a year ago his health was failing and we were hoping that he would be well enough to receive us. This is not to be; today we received a letter from Father Mathias at the Monastery.

This short announcement came with an obituary letter from Père Luc CORNUAU, Abbé of La Pierre-qui-Vire, giving the briefest summary of his life and accomplishments. The key phrase in the document is the following; “Artiste et moine, f. Angelico a cherché à unifier sa vie, non sans tension lors des évolutions de la liturgie après le Concile. Son regard pétillant et malicieux laissait entrevoir sa forte personnalité, et son sourire accueillant, sa simplicité ainsi que sa belle confiance en Dieu.” Translated, this reads “Artist and monk, Father Angelico sought to unify his life, not without tension during the changes in the liturgy after the Council. His sparkling and mischievous look revealed his strong personality, his welcoming smile, his simplicity and his trust in God.”

So few words, hinting at so much. But what nothing in the document says is what he accomplished for the history of architecture, specifically, Romanesque architecture. His chef d’oeuvre – the Éditions Zodiaque – is a monumental accomplishment in art history, a collection of over 200 volumes on Romanesque art and architecture. No work in the field is complete without these studies.

Frères Surchamp and Norberto photographing a church in Aragon, September 23, 1986 (Photo courtesy of Románico)

Our admiration for Surchamp is complete, but the sense of loss at his passing has nothing to do with his work. We have lost the luminous spirit of the small monk in the Morvan who had become our friend, our mentor, and our spiritual guide for Via Lucis.

We have one memento of our visits to him that carries his inimitable touch. On our first visit, we met him at the convent and then took him to lunch in Cuisery. Afterwards, he took us to see the Église Sainte Marie Madeleine in the village of Le Villars. He thought it would be interesting for us to photograph. At one point I was shooting the exterior capitals and joked with Père Surchamp that he had now to “sing for his supper”; I handed him the remote and asked him to take the shot. He smiled at me and said “Is the photographer the one who presses the button or the one who composes the shot?” I laughed and said, “Now we’re talking philosophy.” Here is the shot he took – posted in black and white, of course – and even though we never completed the discussion of who the photographer was, I have the pleasure of assigning the metadata and therefore attribute the photo to the master.

That night I asked PJ to express her thoughts on Surchamp. “We were so excited to meet him; I thought it was the meeting of the minds for the two of you. You found someone who you could talk to about the churches on a different level than anyone else, because there is a philosophy in his speaking of these places and the experience of photographing them. You can really understand him when you have done it, like we have. It means a great deal to hear him speak. I think that he looked at the churches as an artist, not just as a priest or a monk or from strictly a religious point of view, but also from an artistic point of view. Which is why you don’t have to be Catholic to love the places. He understands this on a very profound level, as I think we do.

And I love his explanation of the difference between Romanesque and Gothic – the Romanesque induces internal experience and reflection; Gothic induces external reflection. Gothic is the demonstration of the belief of spirituality while Romanesque is the experience of that belief.”

And this from a woman who professes not to speak French.

Surchamp’s artistic view of the world comes from his early love of and training in the fine arts. He was a student of the great Cubist painter Albert Gleize and was greatly influenced by Gleize’s work.

Paysage cubiste, Albert Gleize (1920)

PJ had further thoughts on Surchamp. “He sees the interaction of lights and planes, shapes and shadows. He wasn’t just shooting – most of the photography that you see from that era, they are shooting a picture of the church. But he’s really shooting like we shoot, he’s shooting something else. He is trying to capture the church, but he’s shooting deeper than ‘I want to show someone what this place looks like.’ He’s trying to express all of these other things – the interaction of the architecture with the light, it’s multidimensional feel.”

She continues, “He’s shooting as an artist – taking the religious content aside, you can see that he is shooting it the way an artist would. Of course it’s very realistic, there’s nothing more real than architecture, but like your shot of Fontenay that I love, that’s a perfect example. There’s nothing more realistic than that, but it also wonderfully abstract, and you can look at it and see the bands of light only, it’s abstract.”

As if to confirm this thought, when Surchamp saw PJ’s photograph of the side aisle at the Cathédrale Saint Front in Perigeueux, he smiled at her and said “You photograph as I photograph!”

We were lucky enough to visit with Surchamp in the company of my parents some years ago. At the Basilique Saint Philibert de Tournus, we walked through the old columns of the nave together. We descended the steep stairs into the crypt, and seeing Surchamp in his black robes walking with his hands behind his back was like being taken back centuries in time. I could almost hear the plainsong chants of his Benedictine predecessors as he walked these stone floors among the strong pillars.

We mounted again up into the main floor of the abbey church, my father and Surchamp walked arm-in-arm. I thought, “These are my two fathers, my birth father and my spiritual father”.

PJ with Dom Angelico Surchamp in Le Villars

Driving away, my parents were delighted to have met Surchamp – “He was everything you talked about,” my mother said. Indeed, and more, because my words can never do justice to this accomplished Benedictine monk who has become so important to our lives. “We do not reach beauty except in love, and love requires time and freedom.”

On our last visit with Surchamp at La Pierre qui Vire, he said, À mon âge, tout ce que je dois donner c’est ma mort – “At my age, all I have left to give is my death.” I told him that he had more to give than that, just the joy of our visit with him was a greater gift. He took my arm, looked at me with that old, wise look and said Nous sommes séparés par des milliers de kilomètres et un grand océan, mais nos coeurs sont proches.

“We are separated by thousands of kilometers and a great ocean, but our hearts are close.”

I felt at the time that he was saying goodbye, and it turns out that feeling was correct. He is back in the arms of his great, giving, and loving God who Surchamp cherished with all of his heart. We wish him farewell on his long journey into eternity. We will lay flowers on his grave when we return to our beloved France in September.

I’ve always wondered why certain saints were chosen as patrons for medieval churches. I can easily understand some of the choices – Saint Denis because he is the patron saint of France, Notre Dame in infinite variation, Saints Peter and Paul (or both as in Andlau, Ingrandes, ), or Saint Jacques. But there are many obscure saints who have their churches – Saint Menulphe, Saint Vosy, Saint Vigor, or Saint Cerneuf. We found one of these latter in the Pyrénées last year, the Église Saint Blaise in Lacommande.

Saint Blaise was the bishop of the Roman-Armenian city of Sebastea who is believed to have begun as a healer then became a “physician of souls.” People often turned to Saint Blaise for healing miracles.

Catholic Online describes his death: ” In 316, the governor of Cappadocia and of Lesser Armenia, Agricola, arrested then-bishop Blaise for being a Christian. On their way to the jail, a woman set her only son, who was choking to death on a fish bone, at his feet.

Blaise cured the child, and though Agricola was amazed, he could not get Blaise to renounce his faith. Therefore, Agricola beat Blaise with a stick and tore at his flesh with iron combs before beheading him.”

There is little remaining of Saint Blaise’s church in Lacommande from that built between 1135 and 1140. The part that remains, however – the apse – is something well worth seeing and is decorated with a magnificent ensemble of well-preserved capitals that sit at eye level. It is such a pleasure to be able to investigate the capitals closely with the naked eye instead of using a 400mm lens to mechanically bring them closer.

These capitals are the work of the Master of Oloron and represent biblical and secular scenes, richly decorated and ornamented. We are focusing on four of the capitals for this post. The first two represent the story of the Magi bringing gifts to the infant Jesus. The first capital shows the Magi riding following the star to Bethlehem. The star is to the upper right of the central rider. A second rider can be seen on the left and a third appearing on the right. This is such a richly portrayed scene with the detailing of the horse’s livery, the crown and the vestments.

The second image is of an engaged capital showing two of the wise men presenting their gifts to the Mother and Child. Above them is the star of Bethlehem that served as their guide. Note that Mary and Jesus are shown in the Throne of Wisdom pose that was so popular in Romanesque times.

The second shot is from the right hand side of the composition, showing the third Magi carrying his gift. This is a very clear demonstration of how in the hands of a master sculptor the capitals could be composed in three dimensions with a continuous narrative.

These two Magi capitals are richly decorated and fine illustrations of a popular biblical narrative. The next two capitals, however, are completely secular and far more animated. The first of these shows in the central position a bearded man playing a bowed musical instrument much like a fiddle. The image seems to swirl to the music with curved forms within and above the composition.

The panel to the left, however, brings the capital to life. We see another musician playing a lyre and accompanying a frantically contorting dancer. Again, the swirling of the knot pattern above the capital and the sinuous vegetal forms within the capital create an enormous sense of movement.

The adjacent capital completes the ensemble – a pair of horn players gaily offer up their music while dancing. The plant form behind them graphically echoes the sound from the instruments and brings the scene to vivid life. These four capitals are certainly worthy of the Maitre d’Oloron.

The fact that I was personally unaware of Saint Blaise was no impediment to enjoying the bounty of the sculpture inside. What I thought was true about Saint Blaise was that he was the patron saint after whom my brother Stephen Blaisdell Aubrey was named. This was completely wrong, of course, but PJ was not so ignorant. She remembers growing up as a Catholic school girl in Marion, Ohio, and attending mass for the Feast of Saint Blaise on February 3, the day before her birthday. The priest consecrated two candles, tied them together with a red ribbon signifying martyrdom, and then approached the children kneeling at the communion rail. She remembers that the priest placed the candles on her throat along with a few solemn words in Latin as the blessing. “This was one of the first signs of faith for me growing up,” she says. “As a child it was so mysterious and powerful. I always thought I would never get a sore throat.”

This post begins with a piece of music recommended by our dear friend Nathan Mizrachi. Since it was the inspiration for this post, Einaudi’s Primavera makes a perfect accompaniment for a moment that was Spring in itself.

Today, PJ gave me a series of pictures of doors that she has photographed in Romanesque churches in France over the last decade. I ran a number of errands and used the time to think about the shots, about what I would write to describe her fascination with these old portals. I thought about how these doors lead us into a long-gone world of spirituality, of generations of veneration by the residents of the small towns where the churches were found. I tried to find a key to these doors; a way in, a way to understand.

But my thoughts were muddled; I felt overwhelmed by polarizing political dialogue, the self-righteousness of both the ignorant and the educated. We have created the horrible condition where children are gunned down in their schools, where our political world is corrupted by special interests, and our culture debased by celebrity and fashion.

Église Saint Martin d’Ur, Ur (Pyrénées-Orientales). Photo by PJ McKey

After awhile, however, I just grew tired. I was tired because I am ill, I was tired because I felt inadequate to the task of writing, and most of all felt so tired about the world around me, wondering if a word that I wrote would mean anything to anybody.

In this exhaustion, I needed something different, a momentary diversion, an infusion of beauty, if I could find it. So I put on Ludovico Einaudi’s Primavera on my car stereo and drove the back way home through the forest. In our rural area there was no traffic to distract me from the music. Suddenly, three does crossed in front of me on the road ahead. When they saw my car, they did what they usually do – they bolted up the side of the hill and disappeared into the trees.

Notre Dame d’Orcival, Orcival (Puy de Dôme). Photo by PJ McKey

For some reason, however, I stopped, rolled down the window. Then I turned up the music so that they could hear it clearly. Instantly, all three deer stopped and their ears peaked; they turned and stared down at me from forty feet away. I turned up the music even higher and just sat there, watching and waiting. Within thirty seconds, they had started down the hill and approached the car, eventually stopping just five feet away, staring at me. The music was so beautiful, the deer responded to that beauty and stood there listening, calm, unfrightened. The closest deer looked at me with an ethereal calmness, her brown eyes fixing mine, probably wondering why there were tears running down my cheeks.

Basilique Saint Fris, Bassoues (Gers) Photo by PJ McKey

Finally the music stopped and the deer looked up and around, then turned and silently disappeared into the trees. They left me alone, car idling in the middle of the two-lane road, sitting for some period of time. When I emerged from my reverie, I felt a certain calmness, that everything was temporary; my illness, the politics of this world, everything. Beauty still exists and the I still respond to it. PJ and I respond to it in our private Romanesque world. Even the animals of the forest respond, their hearts beating a synchronized duet with my own.

Église de Mailhat, Mailhat (Puy de Dôme). Photo by PJ McKey

And suddenly I thought of a small 90 year old French monk who lives in another woods at La Pierre Qui Vire in France. I thought of Angelico Surchamp who has loved these same churches as we have but for fifty years longer.

And I thought of what he said about beauty; “We do not reach beauty except in love, and love requires time and freedom.”. And PJ’s doors opened to me and I felt her love.

Life is always a series of adventures, some of which we would gladly avoid. There have been two incidents recently that fall into that category. PJ and I bought a wonderful Salvatore Grippi painting at auction but it turned out to be too big to mail and a delivery by truck would have cost a fortune. So Mike Bruce, my brother in law, and I drove to Ithaca, New York to collect the painting. Of course, the day we selected for the pickup coincided with a snowstorm. We went to the auction house for the painting and Mike and I began our journey back to Columbus, Ohio. The first five hours of the drive were icy and snowy and we had to be very careful of the conditions. As a result, we didn’t talk as much as we normally would. After lunch, though, conditions were better and we sped merrily on our way. Mike and I were still busy chatting at about 8:30 at night on the freeway, so much so that I wasn’t paying attention to the gauges. I ran out of gas!!!!!!

We ended up on the side of the highway in the dark with trucks roaring by. It was 15 degrees outside. We called AAA but they didn’t have anyone immediately available. We were disturbed to hear that it would be 45 minutes, but as that time stretched to and hour and a half, we still had no help. The battery on the car died and our flashers didn’t work. Mike had a flashlight app on his cell and we used that until the battery died there. We were now in the dark and very vulnerable to the speeding traffic – we were just a dark shape five feet from the outside lane of the highway. We called the State Police, but they didn’t arrive until we had been on the side of the road for over two hours. Finally, after two and a half hours, AAA came to our rescue. … two and a half hours!!!!! Poor Mike almost froze through; I’m well-padded so there was no problem for me.

The worst part of the whole adventure is that we were just 25 miles from Mike’s house. On a positive note, we now have flashlights, flares, and light sticks in each of our cars.

Salvatore Grippi Still Life (1965)

The second adventure did not involve physical danger, but was even more distressing. Our Via Lucis photo library consists of about 120,000 images stored on a Thecus NAS server with a RAID 10 array This provides us with redundant protection, but we have more. We also have a full online backup. Call me paranoid.

The files are organized and edited in Adobe Lightroom, a tremendous application which allows us full control over the images. The editing is non-destructive; there is no change to the original image, but the instruction sets for the images are stored and applied as needed. We also have complete metadata on every single image. This Lightroom library must be stored locally for each of us. PJ’s was stored on an external hard drive. Don’t worry, there’s a point to all of this.

We recently got new desktop systems, very nice iMacs with 32 GB RAM. We needed to transition from the old computers to the new quickly because we were traveling. I set up the computers as normal, with a new 4TB backup drive. But I did not notice that PJ’s partition on the backup drive was full and she did not pay attention to the notice that the backups were not happening. Of course we had a disaster. PJ had a disk crash on the external hard drive that contained her library files for all of her Via Lucis work. She lost the library files that contained all of the metadata and edits for 10 years worth of work.

Here is an image of the missing files! There were five; France, Spain, Italy, USA, and Iceland (?). I checked everywhere for copies but nothing remained.

Finally, we sent the disk in to a company that specializes in recovering data, and although it was expensive ($2000+), after a month we got word that everything was recovered. We got the disk back yesterday and can go back to work and start posting again! Suffice it to say that double redundancy is the order of the day now.

My mother and father have given me so many gifts that I don’t know how to ever repay them. By their example they imbued their family with a home filled with love and inspiration. For me, they encouraged a love of travel, of culture, and of history. When we lived in Europe they made sure that we knew the French, that we experienced their life and culture. That encouragement opened my eyes, heart, mind and soul to influences that mark me indelibly to this very day. I was so lucky to have them in my life for so long, but as the years passed, thoughts of mortality intruded into the conversation.

On February 7, 2013, I wrote to my father,

Dad, I know in my heart of hearts that some day I will lose you both, but refuse to believe it and try to convince myself that you will live forever. It is so hard to know that one day my life will go on and you will not be there. All that I can do is to cherish the fact that you are both in good health and part of our life. PJ loves you both – you have filled a void in her life, a corner of her heart that has been empty since she was seven years old. I am so proud to be your son.

Later that year, on June 11, 2013 at 8:13 pm, my father wrote a comment on a post that I had just published on growing up in Chauvigny, France. He wrote:

Dennis: Your mother and I recall another incident in Chauvigny. You remember that dinner time was when we all talked about what had happened that day. It was our time for stories from school or work or car repairs, as when Lucille took our Corvair station wagon to the local mechanic to have the carburetor repaired (it was the alternator). One evening it was obvious that you had something important to share. After we said grace you said, “Mom, Dad, do you realize we live where the Battle of Poitiers was fought?” We recognize that day as the one that began your love of history.

That note meant the world to me, reminded me of so much personal history and so many memories, but I never wrote him back.

We did lose him two years later, on July 6, 2015 in the same town – Santa Barbara – where he was born on January 14, 1928. In the intervening years he traveled the world over; the Middle East, New Zealand, Viet Nam, Japan, Korea, Africa, and almost every country in Europe, almost always accompanied by his beloved wife, my mother Lucille. She just turned 90 this month and is a force of nature, but she longs to be reunited with her husband of almost 70 years.

Donald Richard Aubrey (1928 – 2015)

So now, perhaps it is about time to write back to him:

Dad, no question that Chauvigny was a turning point for me. I had forgotten about Mom taking the car to get the carburetor repaired! Sounds like something I would do. But I remember the Battle of Poitiers at that time was the Charles Martel victory over the Saracens, and then later, the English defeat of the French and Jean II in the Hundred Year’s War. Later it also included the battle of Vouillé where Clovis defeated Alaric II – the same Alaric who was supposedly buried in the Champs d’Alaric near Vivonne on the Gayet’s property. The Église Saint George in Vivonne was where Ravaillac had his dream to assassinate Henry IV of Navarre. Just up the road from Vivonne is Lusignan, home to Guy de Lusignan, king of the crusader state of Jerusalem during the Crusades. It was as if oceans of history washed over us. And if that was not enough, from the Poitou we moved to Verdun!!!

I think it would have been impossible for me not to love history as I do. I have always cherished the way you encouraged me in this, walking the battlefields and talking to me. I love you and miss you so.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth. ― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

Basilique Saint Austremoine, Issoire (Puy-de-Dôme) Photo by PJ McKey

There is a conceptual difference between Gothic and Romanesque churches and cathedrals. While the Romanesque builders paved the way for the Gothic, there is a deep and wide chasm between the two worlds. It starts on the outside – Gothic cathedrals make you want to sit on a bench and admire the exterior. One enters later and experiences the wonders of the soaring internal architecture.

The exterior of Romanesque church architecture is different, much simpler. It is dominated by three features – the clocher, west front, and the chevet. The clocher (or belltower), like the contemporary church steeple, identifies the structure from the distance as a church.

Église Saint-Révérien, Saint-Révérien (Nièvre) Photo by PJ McKey

The west front is usually the decorated main entrance to the church and sometimes contains one or two towers. And the chevet is the extreme end of the chancel or choir, usually dominated by the rounded ambulatory chapels. Other than these elements, there is little else that distinguishes the outside of the church, because the goal of the medieval builder was not the exterior, but the creation of interior space.

Eglise de Mailhat, Mailhat (Puy-de-Dôme) Photo by Dennis Aubrey

Within the Romanesque church there are a multitude of elements that define the space. The groundplan alone yields a narthex, nave, side aisles, transepts, chancel crossing, apse, choir and ambulatory. The vertical elements include arcades, tribunes, triforia, clerestories, and vaults, all combined in harmonious order creating rhythms of arches and bands the length and breadth of the church.

The careful arrangement of these elements represents the artistic struggle to define the architecture of belief in an architecture of stone. While they share many of the same structural elements, the Romanesque and Gothic styles reflect different worlds. The Gothic churches speak to our minds, hearts, and aspiring imagination. We admire the achievement of the architecture and are transported by the beauty, elegance, and sophistication. Inside and out, they remind us of the medieval glory of God and a universal order explained by the Christian faith.

Romanesque churches don’t inspire admiration for the exterior; they invite you immediately within. And in these shadowed interiors with their unlit corners, we sense a space that reflects an understanding of the human soul and a darker human imagination.

Basilique Sainte Madeleine, Vezelay (Yonne) Photo by PJ McKey

We sense a faith that does not illuminate brightly like a torch, but acts like a flickering beacon in the distance. We sense the distance we must travel and the dangers we must overcome in order to reach that light. We acknowledge the fear of evil and the terrors of the dark. In the protective embrace of the Romanesque church, we hear the murmuring of subconscious phantoms and sense the truths of which they speak.

The holiday season is time to be thankful, and PJ and I have much to celebrate. We are so pleased and proud to have found friends, colleagues, and fellow Romanesque enthusiasts from around the world here at Via Lucis. We would like to celebrate with this photo of Santa Eularia d’Unha in the Val d’Aran

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Comments on Via Lucis

“There are people who take pictures, there are photographers, and then, there is Via Lucis. This is the most incredible collection of images from Medieval churches I have yet seen. These places are amazing to start with, but what Dennis Aubrey and PJ McKey accomplish in these spaces with a camera is breathtaking.”

“How do you do it – time after time after time – beautiful photographs that need no words and beautiful words that need no photographs? Combined they transport us to the deepest place of our inner selves. Your gifts of self – an eye for finding the beauty in these ancient buildings and your ability to capture that beauty and share it with others – those are your blessings on those of us fortunate enough to know of your site and follow it.” – Jay Fredrich